Mistake No. 10: Lack of Communication Between IT and Facilities

Mistake No. 10: Lack of communication and coordination between IT and facilities in pursuing corporate goals.

An example of this is the development of a data center energy efficiency program that only involves facility recommendations. There are plenty of green IT strategies and opportunities that should be incorporated as well.

Mistake No. 11: Placing an emergency power off (EPO) near an exit door without proper signage and secure casing.

If you ask any data center manager about their EPO, most of them will recall a story about an employee or cleaning crew member who accidentally shut off the power to the facility. Make sure the EPO is properly encased with an alarm.

Mistake No. 12: Designing and building a data center to an "uptime tier" level and not maintaining it to that level after it is built.

You might design your center as a Tier 4 facility today, but if you don't maintain and upgrade your equipment and systems over time, you likely won't be able to sustain Tier 4 performance. Issues such as equipment obsolescence will create outages.

Mistake No. 13: Confusing network latency with application latency.

If moving your servers adds 50 milliseconds of network latency, that doesn't necessarily mean that you will add the same amount of latency to application response times.

Mistake No. 14: Presuming that all of your facility components are being addressed.

I'm referring to the issues that often go unnoticed such as electrical grounding, static electricity or personnel safety, to name a few. Never take anything for granted. Just because you have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), for example, don't overlook the performance of lightning protection and brand circuit monitoring.

Randy J. Ortiz is Director of Data Center Design and Engineering at Internap. A 20-year industry veteran, Randy has overseen the design and construction of more than one million square feet of data center facilities worldwide. He can be reached at randyo@internap.com.